Enviado por Passageiro61 em 05/02/2012
Western sem legendas com John Wayne
Stagecoach is a 1939 American Western film directed by John Ford, starring Claire Trevor and John Wayne in his breakthrough role. The screenplay, written by Dudley Nichols and Ben Hecht, is an adaptation of "The Stage to Lordsburg", a 1937 short story by Ernest Haycox. The film follows a group of strangers riding on a stagecoach through dangerous Apache territory.
Although Ford had made many Westerns in the silent film era, he had never previously directed a sound Western. Between 1929 and 1939, he directed films in almost every other genre, including Wee Willie Winkie (1937), starring Shirley Temple. Stagecoach was the first of many Westerns that Ford shot using Monument Valley, in the American Southwest on the Arizona-Utah border, as a location, many of which also starred John Wayne. In Stagecoach the director skillfully blended shots of Monument Valley with shots filmed at Iverson Movie Ranch in Chatsworth, California, and other locations.
The screenplay is an adaptation by Dudley Nichols of "The Stage to Lordsburg," a short story by Ernest Haycox. The rights to "Lordsburg" were bought by John Ford soon after it was published in Collier's magazine on 10 April 1937. According to Thomas Schatz, Ford claimed that his inspiration in expanding Stagecoach beyond the barebones plot given in "The Stage to Lordsburg" was his familiarity with another short story, "Boule de Suif" by Guy de Maupassant. Schatz believes "this scarcely holds up to scrutiny" and argues that a more likely inspiration was Bret Harte's 1892 short story "The Outcasts of Poker Flat."
Ford's statement also seems to be the basis for the claim that Haycox himself relied upon Guy de Maupassant's story. However, there appears to be no concrete evidence for Haycox actually being familiar with the earlier story, especially as he was documented as going out of his way to avoid reading the work of others that might unconsciously influence his writing, and he focused his personal reading in the area of history.
Stagecoach has been lauded as one of the most influential films ever made. Orson Welles argued that it was a perfect textbook of film making and claimed to have watched it more than 40 times during the making of Citizen Kane.
- C'est le film qui révéla John Wayne au grand public. Il allait devenir pour une quarantaine d'années la figure emblématique des westerns américains.
- Ce sont des Indiens Navajos qui ont joué les Apaches dans le film.
- L’album de bande dessinée La Diligence (1968), quarante-septième histoire de la série Lucky Luke par Morris (dessin) et René Goscinny (scénario), met également en scène certains ingrédients de ce western : une diligence transportant un échantillon de personnages de l’Ouest (cocher fruste, joueur professionnel, représentant de commerce, cocotte) voyage de relais en relais et doit faire face à des indiens belliqueux.
- De 1935 à 1949, le réalisateur italien Michelangelo Antonioni exerça le métier de critique de cinéma. Voici ce qu'il écrivit, à propos de La Chevauchée fantastique : « Après ce film il faut vraiment placer John Ford, narrateur et psychologue-né, parmi les plus grands metteurs en scène contemporains. […] Mais ce dont on devrait parler longuement, c'est le style avec lequel Ford a rendu tout cela […] Ford est revenu à la forme ancienne, au muet, mais à un muet qui contient toute la richesse des autres expériences, y compris de la bande son. Cette dernière, dans La Chevauchée fantastique, joue un rôle admirable : le motif qui revient avec la vision de la diligence, les cris du cocher et tous les autres sons et voix sont d'une précision absolue ; la précision, d'ailleurs, signifie surtout poétique, choix concis des éléments de la narration et de l'enchaînement rythmique. » (Cinema, 25 novembre 1940) (Wikipedia)
-
-
-
-